(The figures are from May, the most recent available).

No fair clicking until you make your answer.

We discussed this in yesterday’s Adult Sunday school–KSH.

Religious leaders say they are exploring short and long term strategies for communities to end reliance on food aid in Africa, as relief organizations continue to minister to thousands suffering from drought and famine in the Horn of Africa.

The worst drought in 60 years is affecting more than 12 million people in Kenya, Ethiopia, Djibouti and Somalia. Its epicentre is Somalia, where tens of thousands are fleeing to refugee camps in Kenya and Ethiopia.

“We would not only want to work on the immediate needs, but we are thinking, because this is becoming a chronic problem, we have got to see the root causes and fight it,” Archbishop Ian Ernest of the Indian Ocean Province and the chairman of the Council of Anglican Province of Africa told a news conference on Aug. 10 in Nairobi after a meeting of Anglican archbishops.

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Kathy had been out of the job market for about 25 years””instead staying home with her three children””when everything fell apart….

Kathy isn’t alone. In some communities surrounding Edison, 27 percent of the population lives below the national poverty level.

For Kathy and many others, a church in nearby Highland Park offers a unique solution. A Better World Café, one of a handful of “pay-as-you-can” restaurants in the United States, provides clients with good meals and job training, among other things. Hosted at the Reformed Church of Highland Park, the idea for the restaurant was hatched in 2009 in a group working to meet local needs.

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“Every day we are seeing more and more heartbreaking news about the drought and famine in Somalia and the eastern parts of Africa. We see millions of people being forced from their homes, leaving behind what meager possessions they had, and walking for days over rough terrain,” wrote Archbishop Dolan and Bishop Kicanas.

“There are parents whose little children have died, and children who have been orphaned. They are suffering from hunger, thirst, disease, and drought,” they said. “It is a humanitarian crisis that cries out for help to Christians throughout the world. The Holy Father, on several occasions, has asked Catholics to respond generously to the desperate needs of our brothers and sisters in East Africa.”

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In Somalia, 3.2 million people — by some estimates almost half the East African country’s population — are in need of “immediate life-saving assistance” and another 11 million in the Horn of Africa have been affected by the region’s worst drought in 60 years, according to news reports and the United Nations.

Famine and conflict have driven hundreds of thousands of Somalis across the nation’s borders in search of asylum and assistance, with some 400,000 inhabitants at Dadaab, the largest refugee camp in the world, located in northeastern Kenya, according the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.

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From here:

God, our refuge and strength,

we pray for the people of Somalia and the Horn of Africa

as they face drought, famine and hardship.

Bring near the day when wars shall cease

and poverty and pain shall end,

that earth may know the peace of heaven

through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen

Ecumenical faith leaders in Africa today launched a Call to Action and Appeal for the people affected by famine in the Horn of Africa.

The move came after a two day meeting in Nairobi led by the Council of Anglican Provinces of Africa and involving the All Africa Council of Churches the Lutheran World Federation, WCC-EHAIA, FECCLAHA, LWF, OAIC, WSCF, EAA, ACT Alliance and World Vision, brought together by the Anglican Alliance for development relief and advocacy.

As the first Africa regional ecumenical and interdenominational gathering in response to the food insecurity and humanitarian crisis, the group paid tribute to the heroic work of the humanitarian agencies, churches and others who had saved millions of lives working in difficult circumstances to meet the needs of people fleeing drought, famine and war.

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Anglicans are to meet in Nairobi next week to launch an appeal and advocacy campaign on the food crisis sweeping East Africa.

The meeting which will bring together primates and bishops from the worst hit areas, comes as the UN announced a deepening of the famine in southern Somalia.

The meeting is being organised jointly by the Council of Anglican Provinces of Africa and the Anglican Alliance for development, relief and advocacy, through its Africa facilitator, Emmanuel Olatunji.

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– It took 32 days for Fatima Mohammed to make it from her drought-racked farm in Somalia to the relative safety of a sprawling refugee settlement in northeastern Kenya. There were days, she recalled, when her children were so thirsty that they could not walk and the men in her family would ferry them ahead, returning to carry two more children in their arms.

Fatima Mohammed told Catholic News Service that her family had lived through drought before, but that support from aid agencies helped them survive until the rains returned.

“This time, al-Shabaab won’t let them in,” she said, referring to the Islamist group that controls portions of Somalia. “So when our animals started dying, our only choice was to stay and die ourselves, or else start walking for Kenya.”

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The Shabab Islamist insurgent group, which controls much of southern Somalia, is blocking starving people from fleeing the country and setting up a cantonment camp where it is imprisoning displaced people who were trying to escape Shabab territory.

The group is widely blamed for causing a famine in Somalia by forcing out many Western aid organizations, depriving drought victims of desperately needed food. The situation is growing bleaker by the day, with tens of thousands of Somalis already dead and more than 500,000 children on the brink of starvation.

Every morning, emaciated parents with emaciated children stagger into Banadir Hospital, a shell of a building with floors that stink of diesel fuel because that is all the nurses have to fight off the flies. Babies are dying because of the lack of equipment and medicine. Some get hooked up to adult-size intravenous drips ”” pediatric versions are hard to find ”” and their compromised bodies cannot handle the volume of fluid.

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Speaking at Kamusinga in Bungoma county, the Archbishop said raging famine in Northern and Eastern Kenya “was the result of government’s failure to plan” and the buck stops with the grand coalition government’s top leadership.

Archbishop Wabukala observed that occurrence of drought was cyclical and government ought to have put in place emergency measures to counter its negative effects on populations in arid and semi arid areas early enough, but did nothing instead leading to the massive starvation being witnessed in the country.

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All too often the international community, or more specifically the former colonial powers, get blamed for interference, and for the destabilisation and disincentivisation of local initiative in these regions. And yet when children are dying, food and water need to be provided fast, it is often the international community which is best equipped for a rapid response. In Britain, we can be encouraged by the swift response from the Department for International Development, and it is my hope that governments of other nations respond as generously ”“ especially countries of the African Union. They cannot vicariously leave it to Kenya and Ethiopia.

But this is not the only response, and not, ultimately, what is needed to secure a better future for the region. In Eastern Kenya, the people living in the most desperate need are often those outside of the refugee camps. They see the refugees inside benefiting from World Food Programme handouts, while outside they struggle to feed themselves and keep their goats and cattle alive. Despite the horrors of life inside the camps, there is real security there – the promise of food, water, and some medical care. Capacity to provide such shelter should be encouraged but we should not forget there is a real need to ensure for those living on the edge, who year after year must eke out an existence in those dry and barren landscapes, are not forgotten. It is also crucial that people get the support locally so that they don’t have to make such perilous journeys to get aid.

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The segment description is as follows:

The U.N. will airlift emergency rations this week to parts of drought-ravaged Somalia that militants banned it from more than two years ago. The foray into the famine zone is a desperate attempt to reach at least 175,000 of the 2.2 million Somalis whom aid workers have not yet been able to help.

Tens of thousands already have trekked to neighbouring Kenya and Ethiopia, hoping to get aid in refugee camps. Responding to the Horn of Africa crisis, the Jesuit Refugee Service has also announced plans to step up ongoing work for Somalis in Ethiopia and Kenya.

Lydia O’Kane sat down with Father Peter Balleis SJ, International Director of JRS and Communications Co-ordinator James Stapleton.

Speaking about severity of the situation Father Balleis says, “ The crisis or so it looks like a new crisis is a chronic crisis. For years and years Somalia is at war, not all parts but a central part and the Somali population are leaving the country as refugees”.

James Stapleton adds that some aid agencies are reporting that they have never seen a crisis on this scale before.

Listen to it all (a little over 14 minutes).

“This study shows that conventional wisdom ”” to eat everything in moderation, eat fewer calories and avoid fatty foods ”” isn’t the best approach,” Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, a cardiologist and epidemiologist at the Harvard School of Public Health and lead author of the study, said in an interview. “What you eat makes quite a difference. Just counting calories won’t matter much unless you look at the kinds of calories you’re eating.”

Dr. Frank B. Hu, a nutrition expert at the Harvard School of Public Health and a co-author of the new analysis, said: “In the past, too much emphasis has been put on single factors in the diet. But looking for a magic bullet hasn’t solved the problem of obesity.”

Also untrue, Dr. Mozaffarian said, is the food industry’s claim that there’s no such thing as a bad food.

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A group of Hindus can sue an Edison restaurant for money to travel to India, where they say they must purify their souls after eating meat, a state appellate court panel ruled Monday (July 18).

The decision reinstates a lawsuit filed against Moghul Express, the restaurant that admitted it accidentally served meat-filled pastries to 16 Hindus whose religion forbids them from eating nonvegetarian food.

The diners said the mix-up has harmed them spiritually and monetarily, and that to cleanse themselves of their sin””even though it was committed unknowingly””they must participate in a purification ritual in the Ganges River.

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Baby boomers say their biggest health fear is cancer. Given their waistlines, heart disease and diabetes should be atop that list, too.

Boomers are more obese than other generations, a new poll finds, setting them up for unhealthy senior years.

And for all the talk of “60 is the new 50” and active aging, even those who aren’t obese need to do more to stay fit, according to the Associated Press-LifeGoes Strong.com poll.

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Your grocery bill isn’t catching much of a break this summer.

The Consumer Price Index for food at home ticked up 0.2 percent from May to June. Although the rise was the smallest of the year, the food-at-home index has jumped 4.7 percent over the past 12 months.

Friday’s report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics was a mixed bag. Prices for meat, poultry, fish, eggs, fruit and vegetables fell slightly from May to June. But other major food groups, including cereal and dairy products, continued to inch up.

Read it all from the front page of the local paper.

(ENS) As agriculture ministers from the Group of 20 (G20) nations meet in Paris, France, this week to discuss how to combat food shortage and soaring prices, Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori has written to U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, urging “consideration of the needs of people in developing countries most affected by food insecurity.”

Jefferts Schori, noting that most of the Anglican Communion’s 80 million members live in developing countries, said: “The focus on food at this year’s G20 represents an important recognition by the world’s leaders that rising food prices present a potential crisis for areas of the world most affected by hunger and malnutrition, especially Africa and South and Southeast Asia.”

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The café was started after Hurricane Katrina to feed those without kitchens, said the Rev. Jim Quigley, pastor of St. George’s.

Soon, it was serving up to 10,000 meals a year ”” mostly on Thursday and Friday nights ”” but as funding dried up, the church cut back to one day a week.

Quigley said St. George’s opted to make that meal breakfast, to give those in need a hearty start to their day.

“No one leaves hungry,” he said. “They can stay for seconds as well, and we treat everyone with dignity and respect.”

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Fill in the blank: Just one short decade ago, about 10 percent of America’s corn went to ethanol. Now, the number is closer to _____ percent….

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Anglican church leaders have written to G20 agriculture ministers to press for measures to combat high food prices ahead of the ministers’ meeting next week.

Control of the speculation in commodity trading that has pushed up food prices for the poorest people in the world, and more support for women farmers who form the majority of subsistence farmers are some of the measures that archbishops from G20 countries have urged their agriculture ministers to support.

The moves have come amidst mounting concern over the price spikes and food insecurity that have left 900 million people around the world hungry. The French President has put food on the agenda for the G20 meeting in November, and next week’s agriculture ministers meeting will seek an agreement on the way forward.

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The Anglican Alliance launches a food campaign targeting G20 and African governments in the run-up to this month’s meetings on the global food crisis.

Support for women farmers will be a focal point for the campaign which will also call for action to control speculation, improve market access for developing country farmers, and increase spending on agriculture.

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Every year during the 40 days of Lent, millions of Catholics honor Jesus’s crucifixion by foregoing meat in their Friday meals. But starting this September, if the bishops of England and Wales have their way, Catholics there will abstain from meat every Friday, year-round. This change marks the revival of a practice that the church abandoned a half-century ago””and it’s the latest of several in recent years.

Catholic tradition calls for acts of penance every Friday, the day of Jesus’s death, but observance of that tradition has changed dramatically since the modernizing reforms that followed the Second Vatican Council (1962-65). Bishops in most countries eliminated abstinence from meat or limited it to Lent alone, and each Catholic became free to choose his own form of Friday penance: skipping television, perhaps, or taking the stairs instead of the elevator. This effectively meant the disappearance of Friday penance altogether. In my 11 years of Catholic schooling, I don’t recall hearing it mentioned once.

That’s why the announcement by the bishops of England and Wales is so significant….

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Looking beyond poor eating habits and a couch-potato lifestyle, a group of researchers has found a new culprit in the obesity epidemic: the American workplace.

A sweeping review of shifts in the labor force since 1960 suggests that a sizable portion of the national weight gain can be explained by declining physical activity during the workday. Jobs requiring moderate physical activity, which accounted for 50 percent of the labor market in 1960, have plummeted to just 20 percent.

The remaining 80 percent of jobs, the researchers report, are sedentary or require only light activity. The shift translates to an average decline of about 120 to 140 calories a day in physical activity, closely matching the nation’s steady weight gain over the past five decades, according to the report, published Wednesday in the journal PLoS One.

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Pension funds and other institutional investors that have poured billions of pounds into commodity index funds could be unwittingly fuelling a rise in global hunger, says a new report from Christian Aid.

Such investments in indices of commodities bundled together have become increasingly popular in recent years following deregulation and the bursting of the dot.com bubble.

Food price rises led World Bank President Robert Zoellick last month to warn: ”˜We are one shock away from a full blown crisis.’ Cereal prices, which are of crucial importance to the world’s poorest people, hit a record high in recent weeks on the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s price index. Even with inflation taken into account, the rate was 5.5 points above the previous record in mid-2008, when food riots broke out in more than 30 countries.

Read it all and you may find the full report there (pdf).

The word “cafeteria” just doesn’t cut it. The Bear’s Den in the South 40 dorm complex at Washington University is really more like a collection of high-end mini-restaurants, serving everything from fresh seafood to vegetarian.

And like the student body it serves, the Bear’s Den has become increasingly diverse, a place that needs to please more palates and ideologies.

So, early this year, when the campus’ Muslim Student Association approached the school’s food service provider, Bon Appetit, and asked it to provide halal options ”” food prepared in accordance with Islamic law ”” the company agreed. In April, with the Student Union’s support, the Bear’s Den launched a halal food service, making Washington University the first school in the state to offer halal food, according to organizers.

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Calories may count, but most people aren’t counting them.

Only 9% of people in the USA can accurately estimate the number of calories they should eat in a day, and 9% keep track of their calories every day.

People have plenty of excuses for not tracking: They say it’s extremely difficult, and they lack the interest, knowledge and focus. Some say they’re not convinced that it matters all that much.

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… if we’ve avoided rerunning the 1930s only to end up with a repeat of the 1970s, the public will judge… [Ben Bernanke] to have failed.

To this, the Fed has a stock response. It points to the all-urban consumer price index (CPI-U) and notes that it was up only 2.7 percent in March relative to the same month a year earlier. Strip out the costs of food and energy, and “core CPI”””the Fed’s preferred measure””is just 1.2 percent. When Google unveils its new index of online prices, it’s likely to tell a similar story.

To ordinary Americans, however, it’s not the online price of an iPad that matters; it’s prices of food on the shelf and gasoline at the pump. These, after all, are the costs they encounter most frequently. And with average gas prices hitting $3.88 a gallon last week, filling up is now twice as painful as when President Obama took office.

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Distraction and extraction. These are the skills, timeless, of thousands of thieves who work in New York, without a weapon and without attracting notice.

Where in the city can such a thief visit dozens of happy hunting spots on an afternoon’s walk, finding rooms crowded with people staring at laptops or iPads, or texting or talking on phones, and ignoring their purses? A place so comfortable and familiar, with its jazz, leather chairs and Wi-Fi, that customers, otherwise savvy to the city’s dangers, do not think twice about saving a round blond-wood table with a bag or a laptop while they stand in line?

You may be there now, with a grande caffè mocha….

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….[Rabbi Tuvia Geffen] of the long beard and wire-rim glasses and Yiddish-inflected English, a man by all outward appearances belonging to the Old World… was the person who by geographical coincidence and unexpected perspicacity adapted Coca-Cola’s secret formula to make the iconic soft drink kosher in one version for Passover and in another for the rest of the year. To this day, his 1935 rabbinical ruling, known in Hebrew as a teshuva, remains the standard.

That ruling, in turn, did much more than solve a dietary problem. A generation after Frank’s lynching, a decade after Congress barred the Golden Door, amid the early stages of Hitler’s genocide, kosher Coke formed a powerful symbol of American Jewry’s place in the mainstream.

“Rabbi Geffen really got the importance of it,” said Marcie Cohen Ferris, a professor of American studies at the University of North Carolina, who specializes in Jewish life in the South. “You couldn’t live in any better place than the South to get it. To not drink Coca-Cola was certainly to be considered un-American.”

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